One Yellow Button May Negatively Affect Your Paid Search Advertising

The day has finally come for Google. Some predicted it. Some did not. Regardless, it’s here.

The European Commission’s competition group has cuffed Europe Google over the issue that the search engine does not clearly mark their PPC ads well enough. They claim that many of Google’s paid search links look too similar to Google’s organic search links.

This has spurred Google to recently roll out bright yellow “ad” icons (see below) to various countries and certain mobile search experiences, and it’s speculated that the button will be globally implemented very shortly.

Barry Schwartz, in his recent searchengineland.com article, is guessing that this is the new Adwords format that will be rolling out officially on both desktop and mobile search results in the next couple weeks.

How drastically will this impact paid search and organic search, if at all? Only time will tell.

Let us know if you get any early feedback. We’d love to hear from you!